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Potential question 1 unseen text... Ikea 2016 advert

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Potential question 1 unseen text... Ikea 2016 advert

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Analyse this text using:
-narrative codes
- visual codes
- technical and audio codes
(40 marks)

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IKEA - Wonderful Life - Full TV Advert #WonderfulEveryday

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IKEA - Wonderful Life - Full TV Advert #WonderfulEveryday Subscribe to IKEA here: https://www.youtube.com/IKEAUK It's funny what we think of as the important moments in life; like holidays, parties, or big nights out. But what about the little moments in between these special occasions?

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Most kids watch a lot of TV. But if - like us - you grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and there wasn't so much as a park or playground as an alternative - TV and film was your only outlet. While the temperature outside was 40C and homework was neglected, we would watch films. Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Woody Allen and the Coen brothers were favourites. We rooted for Duckie in Pretty in Pink, hid behind the sofa during Jaws, were baffled by Blue Velvet, and learned about love wandering the streets of Vienna with Jesse and Céline in Before Sunrise.

All of these films we love to this day, but none of them contain a single named character of colour. Film may be the land of imagination - but what was Hollywood saying when our heroes never looked like us?

We grasped at the rare appearances of actors of colour - we loved badasses including Billy Dee Williams in Star Wars (cape!), Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction (guns!), and Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (wig!). But more often, characters fell into tired stereotypes (see the sidebar below for 10 of the usual suspects).

It's not getting any better. Last year, there were valiant attempts to undermine the all-white Oscar nominations with the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. Newsflash: the average 63-year-old white male Academy voter doesn't care about hashtags. Despite an effort by the Academy to diversify the voting pool, this year we have yet another whitewash. One could argue that every year at the Oscars is a whitewash - only one woman of colour has ever won best actress (Halle Berry), and only 7% of best actor winners are men of colour (with nearly 40 years between two of the black winners, Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington). Some commentators, such as Andrew Gruttadaro, have even suggested that it's not the Academy's fault that "this year, no black people deserved a nomination". Yup, like that time that Driving Miss Daisy "deserved" to win, when Do The Right Thing didn't even get a nomination.

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Halle Berry: the only woman of colour to have ever won a best actress Oscar Photograph: Timothy A. Clary/AFP

This year's host, Chris Rock, has dubbed the Oscars "the white BET awards". Jada Pinkett Smith noted over the weekend that "people of colour are always welcomed to give out awards ... even entertain, but we are rarely recognised for our artistic accomplishments". On Monday Spike Lee announced that he will be boycotting this year's ceremony. "We cannot support it and mean no disrespect," he wrote on Instagram. "But how it is possible for the 2nd consecutive year all 20 contenders under the actor category are white?" And Don Cheadle tweeted that the closest he'd be getting to the Oscars this year would be parking cars for the nominees.

We can all lament the lack of nominations in a particularly strong year for actors of colour (sorry Idris Elba, Samuel L Jackson, Tessa Thompson, Michael B Jordan and Will Smith), but let's be honest, those we would mention are the lucky few who make it onto our screens at all. The problem isn't just a lack of recognition come awards season - it's Hollywood's staggering lack of representation across all of its films.

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No nomination: Tessa Thompson in Creed. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

This state of affairs, of course, inspired Dylan Marron's Every Single Word Tumblr, where he has edited together all the lines spoken by characters of colour in dozens of films from the past 50 years. In the entire Harry Potter film series, nearly 20 hours in total, only six minutes are spoken by characters of colour. Most of that six minutes is taken up by a mini Ian Wright commentating a Quidditch match. Birdman? Fifty seconds. American Hustle? Forty seconds. Fault In Our Stars? Twenty-eight seconds. Black Swan? Twenty seconds. Frances Ha? Eighteen seconds. Midnight in Paris? Nine seconds. The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy? Forty-seven seconds, but only if you count the orcs as black.

Since the 1980s, the Bechdel test has become the go-to method to measure whether women are adequately represented in film. It's simple - two women must talk to each other about something other than a man. There have been attempts at a racial Bechdel test. The eponymous test posited by author Nikesh Shukla (two main characters who are people who of colour who talk to each other without mentioning their race) highlights one problem facing actors of colour. But the reality is even worse: most don't get to talk about race; they just get to talk about the film's white protagonist. If they get to talk at all. So we propose the following five questions instead: Are there two named characters of colour? Do they have dialogue? Are they not romantically involved with one another? Do they have any dialogue that isn't comforting or supporting a white character? Is one of them definitely not magic? (See below.)

The test is not designed to be failed. We set the threshold at two characters. Just two. Any two. Of this year's best picture Oscar nominees, only three of the nominated films pass the test (The Big Short, The Martian and The Revenant), two fail (Mad Max and Room), and three do not have a single named character of colour in them (Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn and Spotlight). Last year, only two of the eight nominated films passed our test (American Sniper and Selma) and half of the films nominated did not feature a single named character of colour (Birdman, Boyhood, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything). In 2014, four out of the nine nominated films passed, in 2013, six out of nine passed (a bumper year boosted by Django Unchained, Life of Pi and Beasts of the Southern Wild). If you look at best picture winners over the past 15 years, six pass our test (including 12 Years A Slave, Slumdog Millionaire and Crash) but seven do not have a single named character of colour.

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No nomination: Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation. Photograph: AP

Blockbusters fare a bit better. Of the 10 biggest non-animated films of 2015 (we couldn't get our heads round what all the different character colours in Inside Out meant), seven passed: Jurassic World, Furious 7, The Martian, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Avengers: Age of Ultron (by the skin of its teeth), Pitch Perfect 2 & Ant-Man. All 10 films have at least one named character of colour in the cast. But it's a sad day when you're celebrating the appearance of a single non-white face in a film.

Highbrow and indie cinema fares much worse - white characters dominate the back catalogues of Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, Sofia Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Lars von Trier, Spike Jonze, Terrence Malick, and most other Croisette darlings.

A simple test is not enough. As with the Bechdel test (Run Lola Run is a very feminist film that fails, and Showgirls is a questionable one that passes), our test has its limits. Passing it does not mean that a film automatically becomes a diversity hero, or even any good (we're looking at you, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation). Some are decent films, but are simply retreading narratives that we are fed again and again: our particular favourites are when White-People-Solve-Racism (The Help) or Arabs-Are-Up-To-No-Good (The Hurt Locker). But other films that pass the test contain troubling representations of race, whether that's the faceless violent Arabs of American Sniper or the cliched gangbangers of Crash. What our test does do is force you to analyse what you notice in a film. We hope that, once you see these things, you cannot unsee them.

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No nomination: Michael B Jordan in Creed. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros

Is it political correctness gone mad to insist that every film has an allotted number of people of colour cast in it? There are undoubtedly historical settings that might require very specific casting (though the erasure of people of colour from the historical narratives of films such as Suffragette is grating). We're not going to insist on a black man being cast in Valhalla Rising any more than we would insist on a woman being cast in The Shawshank Redemption. But the whitewashing of Other narratives is an epidemic in Hollywood today.

In the last few years, there has been Emma Stone's casting as an Asian-American in Aloha, and the all-white casts of Gods of Egypt, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and Noah. The internet implodes when a black actor is cast in a role of non-specified ethnicity - highlights include the trolling of 14-year-old Amandla Stenberg, who played Rue in The Hunger Games, and the collective online brain fart that happens if you dare put the words "Idris" and "Bond" in the same sentence.We are sick and tired of seeing films set in the bustling metropolises of London, New York and Los Angeles and not seeing the reality of those cities represented. Instead of thriving diverse communities we are treated to the same pallid visions of cities where everyone looks exactly the same, but never like us. What distresses us even more is the idea that only people of the same ethnic group can be friends, let alone love interests. Returning to the world of Harry Potter, the character of Lavender Brown was recast from a black actor in the first films to a white actor just in time for her to become a romantic prospect for Ron Weasley. Our white grandmother married our black grandfather in 1955, but in 2015 we are still longing to see interracial relationships enacted on screen.

In 1988, Eddie Murphy, while presenting the best picture award, broke with his usual clowning and said: "I will probably never win an Oscar for saying this, but what the hey, I gotta say it ... I came down here to give the award, but I feel we have to be recognised as a people. I just want you to know that black people will not ride the caboose of society or bring up the rear any more." Over a quarter of a century later, we have utterly failed to meet those demands.

What do we want? Change. But who has to do the changing? As Viola Davis said, the only thing that separates actors of colour from everyone else is opportunity. So casting directors need to diversify their thinking. Directors need to demand to see different types of actors. Writers should be making more of an effort to write interesting parts for actors of colour that defy stereotypes, or implementing a Geena Davis type solution (simply change any character in a script into a woman) for race.

Maybe it just comes down to money? This year the box office success of films like Straight Outta Compton proved that actors of colour can score with all audiences. Furious 7 was not only a huge box office hit, but has a totally diverse cast. This black box office boom trickled down to other high scorers like Creed and Beyond The Lights, and a film like Tangerine becoming a critical darling (though another Oscar snub). "Black does travel", so to speak, but it's nowhere near enough. It seems that the only way to encourage the studios to throw their weight behind more diverse films is through ticket sales. It's over to you.

The usual suspects
Our top 10 list of stereotypes for people of colour on screen
1. Magical negro

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A wise folksy black character: Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

One of the most popular cliches for black characters, a wise, folksy black character with some connection to magical forces or spiritual insight. They only exist to enable a white character to grow as a

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The film industry's failure to represent people of colour runs far deeper than #OscarsSoWhite. Can a Bechdel test for race help persuade Hollywood to rethink? Plus: from 'the magical negro' to 'the sassy confidante' - the complete guide to tired racial stereotypes

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Potential question 1 unseen text... Channel 4 promotional advert.

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Potential question 1 unseen text... Channel 4 promotional advert.

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Analyse this text using:
-genre codes
- visual codes
- technical and audio codes
(40 marks)

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Channel 4 was set up to provide an alternative voice and reflect Britain in all its diversity.

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Potential question 1 unseen text... ITV First Look for 2016 trailer.

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Potential question 1 unseen text... ITV First Look for 2016 trailer.

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Analyse this text using:
- visual codes
- genre codes
- technical and audio codes
(40 marks)

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Add to your calendar now! http://bit.ly/1JjHjxr There's so much to get excited about on ITV in 2016 - come on in and take a look. For extended previews of many of these new series and an exclusive performance of Ellie Goulding's Love Me Like You Do at Abbey Road watch the videos on ITV First Look.